NYU philosopher David Chalmers explores how modern large language models challenge our traditional views of identity and ethics by generating short-lived, conversational "selves" rather than operating as a single, permanent mind.
By Anne Brice
July 10, 2026
In the early days of personal computing, people imagined artificial intelligence as a single, self-contained system — a kind of digital brain with a fixed identity. Talking to AI meant asking questions to a clearly defined machine.
That picture no longer holds, says David Chalmers, a professor of philosophy and neural science at New York University. Today’s large language models, or LLMs, run on distributed cloud infrastructure, so they don’t behave like a single fixed machine with one clear physical boundary.
